I'm Glad About You(99)

“You have to let someone else do it,” he started.

“I ASKED you to do it, and you said no,” she retorted. “I think that was like a minute ago, I ASKED you to do it—”

“I can’t do it, because I almost got fired for sexually harassing you, remember?”

“That’s why you should do it!”

“Schaeffer will do it. You don’t even have to ask him. He’s probably already done it.” She was about to spit something back at him, but her complete faith in Schaeffer silenced her. It was weird, and touching. The mere mention of Schaeffer seemed to spark a fragile hope somewhere in her that everything would be all right. Schaeffer to the rescue, he thought. And why not? “He was the one who planted all those pieces that saved my job,” Seth reminded her. “After you almost got me fired for sexually harassing you, which need I remind you I didn’t do.”

“I never said you did!”

“You got me in big trouble.”

“You got yourself in big trouble.”

She was coming back, inch by inch. “Well, Schaeffer is the guy who knows this so-called universe. He was the one who told me about it even being out there, otherwise I probably wouldn’t know anything about it because nobody reads that shit.”

“Everybody reads that shit.”

“They read it, and they know it’s junk,” he said. “No one cares, Alison.”

“If no one cared, they wouldn’t have done it,” she told him. “And I worked so hard for them. I showed up on time. I was nice to the crew. I was polite. I never made a fuss when I got the shittiest trailer, or when they kept f*cking with my costumes, or when they were mean to me, I was never rude back—no matter how much shit they threw at me, I was good. I was grateful. I always knew my lines. I flirted with everyone, yes, because you’re supposed to, if I didn’t flirt with everybody, you know what they would say about me? She’s cold. She’s stuck up. And I don’t care—I don’t—but what are they so mad at me for? I was good. Like a good person, good.” The breath of something deeper, a profound disappointment, had entered the room. “And I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’ve done bad things. I have, I’m not . . .” She shook her head, trying to get out from something from the past. He wondered what it was she was trying to forget. “But that wasn’t true here. It wasn’t. And even if people don’t believe what they said, in that stupid article? They’ll believe I did something bad, something that made them hate me. But what was it?”

She had a point. Sadly, not much of one. “Alison, people just do this shit,” he told her. “They don’t care if it’s true or not. They just do it and it makes them feel good and then they go and do other shitty things and that’s the world,” he said.

“That’s not the world,” she said. “You think that? You think that’s the world?” Behind her, the phone rang.

“Yeah, I do,” he admitted. “You can’t answer the phone—Alison—”

“It’s my sister Megan.”

“Family are the worst,” he warned. “They’ll want to talk about it. They’ll want to try and make you feel better, but it will end up making you feel worse.”

“So, like, the only thing I can do for the next three days is hide in my apartment and drink water,” she noted. “That’s great. Five years of starvation and acting like a Barbie doll and and and being nice to the stupid reporters following me everywhere and wearing all those tight dresses and not acting, none of any of that was real acting, and and and now, now nothing. The only thing I can do is nothing. Because it doesn’t matter that I didn’t do anything wrong. I just I just—f*ck it. Fuck all of it. I mean seriously, cheers. Cheers, it’s so much fun being a movie star, seriously, it’s a f*cking blast.” She picked up her plain little glass of water and toasted him.

On the side table, her cell started buzzing.

“Don’t answer it,” he warned.

“It’s my sister Megan,” she sighed. “It’s fine. I’m just going to get this over with.”





twenty-five





MOM WAS SICK. Dad was out of town, off fishing somewhere in Alaska of all places; all the kids had chipped in and given him this stupid fishing trip for his seventieth birthday. So they were still trying to get ahold of Dad. And Mom was sick. They were operating.

Alison couldn’t tell how sick Mom was—she was only sixty-eight, her health had always been excellent—but the story that Megan told was not so great.

“It’s something in her colon.”

“Something like what kind of something? Like cancer?”

“No, it’s not cancer. It’s, the whole colon shut down.”

“What do you mean, shut down?”

“I don’t know, Alison, it apparently shut down. She was having like a bad stomachache, and she called last night and we took her to the hospital and they did a bunch of tests and then they said they had to operate because there was a blockage.”

“A blockage is cancer.”

“The surgeon said it wasn’t cancer.”

“Who’s the surgeon?”

“Dr. Webster. Weathers. Wiggans. I’m sorry. I’ve been up for thirty-six hours.” You couldn’t get mad at Megan; she sounded exhausted and there was some baby screaming in the background. At a time like this, you couldn’t get mad.